Breaking Even

Sellers receive exactly what they paid for home in 2004

By Dennis Rodkin

Published April 6, 2009

GLENCOEList Price: $3.495 millionSale Price: $3.2 million

In September 2004, Alex Zoghlin and his wife, Deann, paid $3.2 million for this 19-room house on the North Shore. A little more than four years later, after spending about $500,000 on improvements, the couple sold the house—for $3.2 million.

The Zoghlins bought the house (with five bedrooms, seven fireplaces, and six-plus baths) shortly after Alex Zoghlin resigned as the chief technology officer of Orbitz.com, the online travel company he cofounded. At the time he and his wife purchased the house, BusinessWeek estimated that Zoghlin’s shares of the company were worth $9.8 million. The couple’s improvements—according to an assistant to the Zoghlins’ real-estate agent, Sharon Friedman of Coldwell Banker—included a home office and a basement home theatre that seats ten.

Anticipating a job-driven relocation to Silicon Valley, Zoghlin put the house on the market in early 2008 priced at $3.85 million. That job in California never materialized, Zoghlin says, “but we decided to leave the house on the market because the chances were good that I’d find another job [out of state].” Instead, Zoghlin ended up as CEO of VHT Inc., a Des Plaines–based company that makes video tours of real estate. The Zoghlins and their four children are now renting in Lake Forest while deciding whether to buy there. According to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, the name of the buyer of the Glencoe house is Andrei Smirnov.